Reel treat for audience

Movie portraying struggle of father to catch a brief glimpse of daughter is shot using fast-disappearing technique as director focuses on framing a work that sees things differently, Xu Fan reports.

From Italian director Giuseppe Tornatore's Cinema Paradiso to British-American auteur Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk, physical films－those on reels to be projected onto screens－have captivated generations of moviegoers and the world's top filmmakers.

Now, Zhang Yimou－the first Chinese director to take home a Golden Bear Award at the Berlin International Film Festival for Red Sorghum in 1988－has also paid tribute to the old cinematic technique.

In his latest directorial outing One Second, which opened across the Chinese mainland on Friday, watching films－a form of entertainment that swept from cities to villages when cultural activities were in short supply in the 1970s, the period in which the new movie is set－is central to the plot, no matter how brief that viewing may be.

Gathering veteran actors Zhang Yi and Fan Wei as well as young actress Liu Haocun, the tale unfolds with a fleeing criminal who makes his escape across a treacherous desert in Northwest China's Gansu province in order to watch a film which contains just one second of footage of his 14-year-old daughter.

The 104-minute film starring Zhang Yi as the criminal and Fan as a projectionist has obtained 7.9 points out of 10 on the country's popular review platform Douban.

Starting his film career as a cinematographer, Zhang Yimou says he has long wanted to portray the physical film era through a down-to-earth and simple story.

"After the celluloid era ended, we have all stepped into this new digital epoch. Memories about physical film are shrouded in the mists of time. I'm afraid many young directors have barely used or even seen a physical film," the director said during an interview with Chinese journalists after the Beijing premiere at the China Film Archive last week.

Driven by nostalgia, Zhang Yimou invited the award-winning writer Zou Jingzhi－known for epic blockbusters like Wong Karwai's The Grandmaster－to pen the script in 2018.

The story was finished in a short time, with the photography, mainly in the Gobi Desert in Dunhuang, taking the crew just 46 days. But the casting of the lead female character, a teenager with a tough life struggling to take care of her younger brother－took much longer.

Zhang Yimou recalls the casting began around three years ago, when his team was selecting a fresh face to play a young princess in his 2018 martial arts film Shadow. This was a significant milestone to help the director recover from the Sino-US flop The Great Wall.

With the original script adjusted, the princess role finally went to A-list actress Guan Xiaotong, but the large-scale casting procedure helped Zhang Yimou to discover Liu Haocun, then a high-school student in her final year preparing for art college entrance exams.

Liu was selected for the fittingly named One Second after Zhang Yimou's casting team audited around 3,000 candidates, with the director impressed by Liu's big eyes that seemed to talk and her inner strength that matches the role of a wild, yet pure-hearted countryside girl.

"She hasn't acted before, not even in a short film or an advertisement," explains the director.

In the film, Liu's character bumps into the Zhang Yi's criminal character when the teenager is attempting to steal a reel of film to make a table lamp cover, after her young brother accidentally burns a cover borrowed from a neighbor. Coincidently, the reel contains the one-second footage of the criminal's daughter.

With a line indicating that the criminal's daughter has died, making the footage her last image left in the world, the two lonely people come to understand each other's miserable lives, generating a father-daughter bond.

Aside from the exploration of humanity, set in a tough and turbulent era, a stylish feature in most of Zhang Yimou's films ranging from Raise the Red Lantern (1991) to Coming Home (2014), what makes One Second distinctive is that it highlights the repair of damaged film－a skill that may soon be lost.

In One Second, a reel gets dragged along a dirt road for dozens of meters. The villagers despair that they will never see the blockbuster Heroic Sons and Daughters. Actor Fan Wei, starring as the projectionist, Fan Dianying, convinces the villagers to hang the film on sticks, using clean water to wash it up before drying the wet film by waving fans slowly and gently.

"I believe fewer directors nowadays know these methods more than me. With a shortage of devices limited by a then shabby environment, we had to 'invent' our own ways to cope with film," says Zhang Yimou.

A native from Northwest China's Shaanxi province, Zhang Yimou demonstrated a passion for photography in his early 20s when he was a worker at a cotton mill in Xianyang, Shaanxi province. Saving up all his spare money, and even selling blood, Zhang Yimou purchased his first camera and developed his skills in the darkroom.

With his artistic gift, Zhang Yimou was admitted to the Beijing Film Academy to major in cinematography in 1978, the second year after the national college entrance exam was revived.

When asked if he mostly favors the stories set between 1960s and 1970s, the director says: "I don't especially favor any period of history. For me, the past is gone. We should all look forward. I wish and believe China's tomorrow will be better.

"The movie is about my growing-up and my adolescent period."

However, the 70-year-old director has a fight on his hands for box office supremacy. Crime thriller Caught in Time went into the lead on its opening day, and One Second has also been passed by Hollywood animated film The Croods: A New Age, which was simultaneously released on Friday.

"The movie is like a 'love letter' that director Zhang writes to commemorate the physical film era. A serious work like that could remind you that cinema is more than entertainment, it also arouses in-depth thought," comments one viewer on Douban.

Contact the writer at xufan@chinadaily.com.cn